I was monitoring our windows server 2003 with IIS 6 the other day, when i discovered that all of our application pools run under Network Service. This in itself isnt a problem, as the server runs isolated from the domain in a DMZ, however the issue was that i have many application pools for different customer sites all configured with different running values but all running under network service, which means that i cant tell which application pool is what under taskmanager, because they run under the image name w3wp.exe.

To setup different "custom" users for each app pool, use the instructions below.

1. If you add a new user to your IIS server, called something like "DefaultAppPoolUser" and give it a sensible password, i also suggest disabling RDP for that user too.
2. This user MUST then be added to the group "IIS_WPG" and also removed from users.
3. By doing this you can now set your application pool to have the user you have created and create one of these for every application pool, thus allowing you to differentiate between app pools.

Feel free to ask me any questions or provide feedback below:

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